“We were wrong to have ever doubted you,” Ruby said.
Isabel wasn’t so sure. The fallout of the day was crashing down on her, and from where she was standing, it seemed like everything she set her hands to turned to shit. She’d lost Sairy. She’d lost the Catchkeep-shrine and the meeting-hall and the rest of that pile of dead. Now she’d lost Foster’s ghosts as well. Whatever was on those chips. The ghost’s name, probably. Without even going through those boxes she was already upwards of ninety percent sure that the missing one was his. That was just the way this day was going.
Her mind was turning inward on itself, curling up, blowing out the lamps in its windows. Nobody home, she tried to project at Ruby. Go away.
“I want to show you something,” Ruby said.
“Anything you want me to see, they can see too.”
Ruby submitted the ghosts to an inquisitive once-over. “One of you must be Foster.” Foster lifted her chin at her, guardedly, and Ruby went on: “Isabel’s shrine-girls have a lot to say about you. I’m given to believe we would’ve been lost without your help. You saved a lot of lives today.”
For a moment, Foster stared at her. Then, with a note in her voice Isabel had never heard before, she gave Ruby a strange little salute and said, “It was my pleasure.”
Ruby led them through the torchlit town. Past rows of bodies, from Sweetwater and Clayspring both, laid out for burial or burning, respectively. Past the red-stained mudpit that used to be somebody’s flower-garden and the back half of their house. Past a boy sitting on a violently tilted roof, something motionless cradled across his lap as he stared out at the moon. Past people looting the invaders’ corpses, and at least two ongoing fistfights, apparently over items found there.
The baker’s, the songkeeper’s, the midwife’s, the tradehouse, the meeting-hall. All ruined. There were streets where one house in maybe three was untouched, its neighbors burned out or broken or mired in mud. It would rain through the roofs of some. Others had halfway nosedived into the earth and gotten stuck there. People scurried between doorways like ants around a disrupted hill. Carrying clothing. Food. Blankets. They were packing these things onto themselves as if preparing for imminent flight. Away to the side of town there was a black mound of something recently burned, an oily plume of smoke still rising.
Once Isabel glimpsed Lissa at a distance. She’d put together a crew and they were reallocating ghostgrass bundles from broken roofs to whole ones.
It put Isabel in mind of the ghostgrass barricades. Of Sairy standing where Foster and the ghost had stood before, silently calling Isabel’s name from beyond that impassible sea of gray-green vegetation.
As they walked, Foster and the ghost gave her the mercy of silence. Also the mercy of remaining at her side. A certain numbness had settled deep into her. A kind of bone-deep chill that locked in and preserved everything she’d rather let go of. She couldn’t walk far enough or fast enough to get out from under what was hanging over her. She had nothing left to offer anyone. The bottom of that barrel had been scraped, and she was done.
When Ruby took her near the black yawn in the earth that had once been the Catchkeep-shrine, Isabel hit her limit. She stopped walking.
A line had formed there, townspeople lowering a lamp on a rope to gawp down into the depths. That sort of drop would smash their heads in like eggshells and they accorded it the same fascinated respect they’d pay a tornado.
Foster bled out down there, Isabel thought bleakly. Now Sairy has too.
“Okay,” she said. Her voice sounded like a dead thing rolling down a hill, only gravity and momentum shoving it along. “What did you want to show me?”
“That,” Ruby said, gesturing expansively.
“What?”
“All of it. Everything you just saw.”
Isabel’s patience was wearing thin. Her leg ached, she was beyond exhausted, she just wanted to find a quiet place to lie down and sleep for a week. Not that she had a bed to sleep in anymore.
“Which part? The trashed town? The bodies? The way the lake is coming up through the streets? I get it. The whole place has gone to shit because of me.”
“These people are alive,” Ruby said, “because of you. Because you spoke with Catchkeep and She granted us counsel which She would speak only to you. Because you and the shrine-girls put in remarkable work. On every level. In every way.” For one horrible second she looked like she was going to reach out and touch Isabel’s face. “The Ragpicker’s favorite sweet is should-have-dones,” she quoted instead. “Don’t give Him yours.”
But Ruby’s words were glancing off of her. They wouldn’t sink in. “I need someplace to sleep,” she said dully.
“My house is yours,” Ruby said, “for as long as you need it.”
“Where will you sleep?” Isabel asked.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Ruby said, in a tone that said there are other beds that will welcome me, and I don’t mind having an excuse to visit them.
Isabel thought of all those burned houses. All those bodies in need of beds. “What about the others?”
“Don’t be silly. You’re the hero of the hour. You and your—” she gestured at Foster and the ghost— “friends. I’m not crowding you out of a well-deserved and proper rest. Honestly it’s the least I can do.” Ruby paused. “Do they…sleep?”
“No. And I just need enough space to lie down in. Send in some others. They’re not going to bother me. I plan to sleep like a corpse.”
“Isabel, please, I am doing you a favor here—”
“Send in some others or I will sleep right here in this street.”
Ruby opened her mouth, then shut it tightly and nodded.
She led Isabel to her house and left her there, not even hesitating, at least not visibly, at the prospect of inviting ghosts into her home. The town knew what Foster and the ghost had done for them, no question. The word of it would have spread very, very quickly. They would all have to rearrange their mental field notes after this.
Ruby’s house was one long low room divided into four sections with curtains woven of what looked like scorchweed-nettle yarn. Isabel staked out the smallest of these sections for herself. A small table was in there, and a couple of stools. On the table was a Before-relic, a kind of game nobody had any idea anymore how to play. A plastic board with black-and-white squares, and a few little plastic discs in black and red. The board had been broken and repaired in at least two places. Moonlight came in through a single window. There was nothing else of note in the room. No bed. No cushions. Nothing comfortable at all. This suited Isabel’s mood perfectly.
“You sit,” Foster said. Not so much pushing Isabel onto a stool as guiding her collapse toward it. “I’m going to find Jen.”
“Don’t you dare. I don’t want to see anybody. I’ll talk to them tomorrow, I promise. Just…not now.”
Halfway out the door, Foster turned. “Oh, I’m not getting her. I’m getting whatever was in that jug she was carrying around back there. You look like you could use it.”
“I don’t—” Isabel called after her, but Foster was already gone.
Isabel sighed. Shut her eyes. Her head felt like a boulder. She let it crash back toward the wall behind. Unexpectedly, it hit something soft. Some kind of thin cushion? She opened her eyes.
The ghost had fetched a quilt from somewhere and had draped it behind her at some point in the past few seconds without her noticing. “Put that back wherever you found it,” she said, shutting her eyes again. “I don’t want it.”
Even with her eyes shut, she could practically see the ghost’s not-quite-shrug. “Make me.”
The bare idea of getting up was daunting enough. She decided to ignore him instead.
Methodically, Isabel’s foot was swinging out and banging back against the stool-leg. How long had it been doing that? She looked at it and it stopped. “Listen, tell Foster it’s nice of her and I appreciate it but I’m just really, really tired.”
Isabel wasn’
t quite numb enough to feel comfortable sleeping in that quilt, but her aching body was protesting that it did look very thick and warm. She piled it on the floor and shucked off the Archivist-coat, not caring when she heard objects rattle out of the pockets to the floor. A few of the black cases, the device. It didn’t matter. What were they going to get, more broken? She kicked them aside, dropped the harvesting-knife to the floor, and settled into her nest, feeling wretched and hopeless and done.
The ghost observed this process in silence, sitting on the floor with his back to a wall, feathered in a soft silver luminescence. As the boxes fell, he reached to turn them label side up, but none of what was written on them seemed to jog his memory overmuch.
“Subject #2122-21-B, Patel, Nida,” he read aloud, in a tone like the songkeeper telling the old stories. “Subject #2122-33-A, Tanaka, Shiro. Subject #2122-17-C, Deegan, Zachary.”
Isabel buried her face in the quilt. It was a whole lot softer and cozier and nicer-smelling than she deserved. She stayed there for a time, too keyed up to sleep, listening to the ghost recite this litany of the twice-lost dead. When he ran out of boxes to read, she pulled the quilt away from her face and looked out.
There he was, exactly as she’d left him. Except he had her harvesting-knife held loosely in one gloved hand, was tapping the knifepoint lightly, pensively against his boot.
Pure dumb reflex, her hand dropped to her sheath. As if there were two knives that looked like that in the world. There would be if he broke his sword, she realized, and pushed the thought away. “Hey. Do I steal your shit?”
He raised his gaze to her, tapped the knife, said nothing.
“Why did you ask me to come with you?” she asked suddenly.
The tapping stopped.
“I mean.” She paused, grasping after the thought, miserable. She couldn’t even formulate the question, though it had burned in her mind for three years like a coal. “I don’t think I can read your memories when I’m dead.” She coughed out a bitter little laugh, hating herself. “But I guess you realized that. No wonder you keep putting so much effort into keeping me alive.”
She hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but then it was out, she’d said it, there was no going back.
She let the silence stretch on. She had no idea what she wanted anymore. She wanted to disappear into the floor. She wanted him to get up and leave. She wanted to fight him. She wanted to sleep for a week. She wanted him to come over and punch her out so she wouldn’t have to think anymore.
“I would rather destroy this thing right now,” the ghost said icily, “than leave you under the misapprehension that I—” He trailed off. Then a blur, and the harvesting-knife had vanished to the hilt in the packed dirt and woven matting of Ruby’s floor. “You,” he spat, “should know better.”
Right then she hit her limit. She was just too damn exhausted to hold it in anymore.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “For everything. If I’d just…I wouldn’t…I would’ve been…”
It took her a second to work up the nerve to look the ghost in the eye, but when she did she was met only with that deliberately mild, deceptively open, almost scholarly consideration that could have meant anything.
“Are you finished?”
“Yeah. I’m finished.”
With infinite, pointed care, the ghost removed his gloves.
“What the hell,” Isabel breathed, seeing what had happened to his hands. But she knew, immediately, horribly, exactly what she was looking at. Foster had shown her the same, earlier, down in the tunnels. We tried to leave through the southern exit, but…
A wide swath of each of the ghost’s palms was completely silvered with profound damage. Foster had scars that would never fully heal, but this—this was wreckage. Like someone had gouged a gaping furrow into each hand. The same along each finger, silver flaking up like birchbark. It came to her that he’d never taken his gloves off in the tunnels, even when cutting his palm on the harvesting-knife. It was a wonder he could even still hold the sword.
“Looks like maybe you should have tried the second hatch instead,” she said at last, instead of everything she was thinking. “No ghostgrass there.”
“Maybe,” he said evenly. “Foster wanted to. But at the time I thought this one made your intentions clear enough.”
Isabel almost laughed, it was so outrageous. But it was very much the logic by which this particular ghost operated. Three years ago she’d found his stubborn pride incomprehensible, infuriating. Today—she still did, honestly. But if he’d forgiven her for shutting him and Foster out of Sweetwater, it was the least she could do to let this slide.
“No,” she replied, so soft she wasn’t sure he’d heard her. “It really didn’t.”
There was a long, long silence. Slowly, deliberately, the ghost put his gloves back on. Even then it was another moment before he spoke.
“Do you want me to go?”
“I don’t know. No. No, I don’t.” Isabel paused. “I very much do not.”
So the ghost resumed his post against the wall, tilting his head back like he could see the whole circuit of the summer stars through Ruby’s ceiling. “All right.”
Eventually Isabel must have fallen asleep, because she dreamed that she was perched on the Catchkeep-priest’s high seat, dropping little silver chips into the Ragpicker’s open maw, one by one by one.
* * *
She woke to full morning, sunlight blasting through the window. She was thirstier than she’d been maybe ever, and ravenous—for about one second, before she remembered where she was, and why, and her appetite receded from her like the tide.
She lay a moment in that empty room, staring at the ceiling. She could hear morning sounds from elsewhere in the house—Ruby had been true to her word after all—and work sounds from outside. Rebuilding efforts, she guessed. She really should get out there and help.
Sitting up, her body informed her in no uncertain terms that this was not going to happen just yet. So she lay back and listened to the noise coming through the window. There was Bex’s voice, bantering with Lissa. It sounded like they were betting on something. Then several voices in unison began chanting Foster’s name, and there came a huge noise that Isabel couldn’t identify, and then cheers. Over them, Lissa: “Chore tokens for a week, enjoy!” and Bex groaning in dismay.
Once she’d gathered her strength she dragged herself to the window and looked outside.
Sure enough there was Foster, helping a group of ex-upstarts rebuild a house across the street. Mostly they were shouting encouragement while she and the ghost slung entire walls into place and braced them, bending their shoulders to a ton or more of stone and scrap and whatnot at a time.
For what felt like a long time she watched them. Their speed, as always, was unreal. In half an hour they made the kind of progress that would take a week for a team.
The way they worked together was mesmerizing, almost impossible for Isabel to look away from. Watching them, she thought back on the paper the ghost used to carry on his search for Foster. On it was printed the only image she’d seen of them alive. They’d been standing in an obviously posed manner—posed by someone else, and against their will, from the look on the ghost’s face—in front of the smoking ruins of a building. For a second it was almost like that picture was the loop they’d been cut from and this, what Isabel was seeing now, was its rightful continuance. They’d busted a building, they were making buildings whole. And when they were finished, this time they could walk away.
Foster caught her looking and winked.
Foster. After everything that had happened, Isabel could only hope to face today with that kind of attitude. Foster was far from stupid. She knew she’d inadvertently done almost as much damage to the town as she had fixed. She might’ve been kicking herself in the ass just as hard as Isabel was. Might be mourning her mistakes and the collateral damage of those mistakes just as keenly. It wasn’t for Isabel to say. But was Foster moping around feeling sorry for
herself? No. Foster was out there rebuilding Isabel’s town for her.
And Isabel could do nothing to pay her back for everything she’d done. The device was broken. She hadn’t been able to find a black box and silver chip for Foster. She’d even managed to screw up something so simple as bringing back the other half of Foster’s sword. All she had to do was picture Salazar to get a crystal-clear image of Foster’s eventual destiny. Pure, uncontrolled, directionless, destructive power. It was only a matter of time.
Which only made Isabel feel worse. She was aware she was wallowing but she didn’t know how much further than that her options extended. She wanted to be able to kick herself in the ass until she felt motivated or shamed into usefulness. Instead she turned back to her quilt-nest and the promise of oblivion.
And paused.
Something, somewhere was beeping faintly.
She tracked the sound across the room, wondering what kind of bizarre salvage whatnot Ruby was hiding. Something that still worked after all this time, it was incredible, Before-relics in the Waste never worked, they got too scoured by the elements, they were—
She stopped dead, right at the edge of a band of bright sunlight on the floor. The sound was definitely coming from pretty much exactly here.
She looked down. In the middle of the band of bright sunlight was the broken device she’d found in the archive room.
She picked it up.
At first she didn’t see it over the glare on the device’s glossy black panel. Squinting helped her make it out. When she did she almost dropped the device all over again.
Up in the top right corner, pulsing faintly in time with the beeping noise, a tiny, dimly glowing, pale green light.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Isabel worked until late afternoon, helping the ghosts and ex-upstarts as best as she was able, past the aches in her body and the self-doubt in her head. It felt like the best and only apology she could genuinely make.
Latchkey Page 32